aw, don't be shy. here's some ideas that I had posted (relatively) recently in the mod's lounge:

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another idea...if any of you have read Calvino's "Invisible Cities," the contest would be to depict a fantastic city from the viewpoint of a traveler. that is, expanding or exaggerating a characterizing a property that you might find in reality into an idealized, dream city...maybe a bit too involving =p

or maybe just a 'stranger in a strange land,' depicting a traveler in a sweeping, unfamiliar world.

another environment contest idea: instead of a landscape or cityscape, maybe a contest about cloudscapes? focus on depicting expansive space and a sense of the gargantuan.

something I just thought of: design an alien character or creature, and depict what kind of internal organs might be in it, or skeletal structure/muscular system.

think about things that might be fun, or things that you want practice with. contests are a great impetus to try things that you wouldn't otherwise try.

Those are all really nice ideas. I think the alien creature one would get people thinking

But I'd probably do something for any of those. I'll try come up with some ideas tomorrow or something... rightnow its so late I thought that your avatar blinked darkreaver >_> You sure its not a GIF....

I emailed Kwiix (btw where is Kwiix?) about a contest idea some time ago, we kinda tossed it back and forth and never really got anywhere with it but it might be worth some thought.

I thought a sort of speedpaint marathon contest might be cool. I thought of 2 possible formats:
A) Everyone has a few hours (around 6 I think would be plenty) to check the subject matter and produce a painting of the subject. This could be a cool activity to repeat... like maybe a month where this happens every sunday or it could be a one time thing too.

B) It could be a similar activity but instead of shortening up time it could a series of paintings over a time period of a couple of days.

The different paintings would be judged as a sets, and under normal judging criteria so as not to make an ordeal out of that.

The problem Kwiix found with it was the potential for cheating... using something you already had and what not, but posting the theme up until the very last minute might mitigate this in the A format. Haven't really thought of a 'fix' for that in the B format.

I also thought it could be interesting to have a 'make-over' contest, I noticed a lot of people like doing those in Sketch Exchanges and other such threads. Mods could post a picture of a character, an object, a scene, even a short sequential and entrants would have to redo it to their own version. This last one just occurred to me, I havent thought it through,

A) Everyone has a few hours (around 6 I think would be plenty) to check the subject matter and produce a painting of the subject. This could be a cool activity to repeat... like maybe a month where this happens every sunday or it could be a one time thing too.

Remember. Some of us sleep during the time others are drawing. With only 6 hours it seems very likely to be missed by possible participants. However a set time a good while before the theme is announced, for everyone interested to be available, could solve that problem.

Meh, I thought of something but I dont know if it would be good :P take an image of a wide empty room (like that one here) and you have to furnish it with whatever you want (it might be any wide space, not necessarly a room). Though I don't know if people would like to all have the same basic image :\

This may be a crazy thought, but perhaps the theme could be playing with food or making the weirdest meal ever kind of deal for a contest. Mama told ya not to play with your food, but she didn't say you couldn't illustrate that. Some examples could include an illustration of a little circus made out of mash potatoes or a cartoonish squid on a plate staring you square in the eye.

You could make a the title a theme...It could be an object, or an emotion or whatever, but every piece the participants make would have the exact same title. Ex: "Rock" could be a pic that focuses on mountains, or pebbles, someone could be throwing the rock, someone could depict a rock concert, ....y'know.

As for things-people-don't-normally-do....how about a contest where we'd draw in the style of someone else? For some reason, I'm thinking of a secret santa-esque format where people who sign up get assigned someone else's style to do within the contest. But that doesn't work very well if people drop out and stuff....also not much of a theme, but maybe you can combine this idea with something else. =/

I think a fun idea would be to have an image that's 5-10 px high and some amount wide (or vice versa) that every entrant has to keep (relatively) unspoiled in their art. After all submissions are in, each piece is combined with the original piece that the 5-10 px high/wide image was taken off. Perhaps there could be some theme/word to describe what's going on in the original (i.e. "Water" or "Robot" or "Hot Chick") or something. I think it could produce some interesting results